Musical Politics in the Cuban Police Order

Abstract

This chapter explores how Cuban popular dance music nurtures and contests revolutionary values in today’s Cuba.1 I focus on the performance and discursive construction of the song ‘Cubanos por el mundo’ by Interativo, one of Cuba’s most popular bands in the last decade, using a combination of textual and musical analysis framed by Jacques Rancière’s notion of ‘police’ and ‘politics’.2 From this perspective I analyze the formation of a ‘Cuban police order’ structured around a shared notion of the revolutionary and discuss how the experience of the song dialogues musically with that order by associating it with pleasure and critique. Empirically I focus on the recording and an improvisation by Roberto Carcassés, the director of the band and composer of the song, during a live performance at a massive concert held to celebrate revolutionary unity at Plaza Anti-Imperialista in Havana. The second part of the chapter discusses how the song nurtured new articulations of ‘politics’ and ‘police’ discursively by studying blogs and newspaper articles written in response to the improvisation.